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Kofi Annan: Stop 'war on drugs'

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Re: Kofi Annan: Stop 'war on drugs'

#81

Post by girvo »

7952 wrote: post #41
pstuart wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I care what the law has to say regarding heroin. Legalize it, regulate it just like alcohol. Being illegal didn't keep my brother from becoming addicted and dying from it. If it was legal and pure he might have had a chance. But on the other hand, nobody is trying to outlaw tobacco and alcohol, which are the biggest killers of all. Thats what did my mom in. So yes, legalize it and keep it pure. Educate people on prop…

A concern is that the practicalities of such a legalization would just make things worse. It could make it much easier for children to get hold of. You would also need to define what is "pure" and police that for an endless list of possible products. It is difficult enough to keep salmonella out of food, effective regulation of cannabis sounds impossible. Any regulation would need to be sufficiently loose that you do…

The major impact to society is because of peripheral crime, not the use itself.

Re: Kofi Annan: Stop 'war on drugs'

#82

Post by bkurtz13 »

rthomas6 wrote: post #68
vkou wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that both drug prohibition and the War on Drugs both started as highly racist policies, it seems to be working as intended.

I'd like to read more about this. Do you have a source for this?

http://www.thehouseilivein.org/

It's on Netflix

Re: Kofi Annan: Stop 'war on drugs'

#83

Post by dragonwriter »

grault wrote: post #76
MichaelGG wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxing them really high will increase the likelihood of black market product, which goes against the public health aspect. You don't want a poor person buying junk and getting sick because they couldn't go to the store and buy proper medicine. Just like you wouldn't heavily tax aspirin or ibuprofen. Basic medical education should be provided as part of national education. Except, properly done, not the factually inco…

Makes sense. It could be difficult to raise money for prevention and rehabilitation purposes from the tax approach. Although maybe wealthy recreational users would happily "fund" the education / rehabilitation of the poor. Or maybe I'm just completely wrong here :D I agree with the other points you've discussed.

> It could be difficult to raise money for prevention and rehabilitation purposes from the tax approach.

Maybe, but it'd be easy diverting money being spent to arrest, prosecute, and imprison people into prevention and treatment (and we're already spending money on prevention and treatment from general state and federal tax money without legalization, so with legalization and no special taxes -- just general income, sales, etc., taxes -- there'd be more money from that, even before you consider repurposing the money currently being spent on the enforcement end of the drug war that would no longer be required.)

OTOH, while there are black markets for alcohol and tobacco -- largely as an effort to evade the special taxes on those products -- the special taxes on them still bring in considerable revenue, and the black market for, e.g., alcohol is far less significant and socially problematic than when alcohol was prohibited. So, its far from clear that special "sin taxes" on legalized drugs would not be useful as a significant additional revenue source for prevention and treatment activities.

Re: Kofi Annan: Stop 'war on drugs'

#84

Post by thelock85 »

rthomas6 wrote: post #68
vkou wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that both drug prohibition and the War on Drugs both started as highly racist policies, it seems to be working as intended.

I'd like to read more about this. Do you have a source for this?

The New Jim Crow by Stanford professor Michelle Alexander is a treasure trove of policy and Supreme Court decisions that have calcified a racial undercaste.

Re: Kofi Annan: Stop 'war on drugs'

#85

Post by rayiner »

proksoup wrote: post #60
rayiner wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more complicated than that. Politicians have a limited amount of political capital, and in American politics even getting little things done requires spending a lot of it. Obama put up some huge numbers and ultimately spent all his political capital just doing two things: 1) getting us out of Iraq; and 2) passing the Affordable Care Act. Ending the drug war is important to some people, but there are tons of peop…

Support the drug war ... for moral reasons? That mother showing pictures of her 4 missing boys in the article this thread is about, I think she would argue the war is immoral. I think the people who think the drug war is moral, would change their mind if they spent more than 30 seconds thinking about it. Baffles my mind, and when pressed in person, even pious blowhards admit there are serious violent death problems w…

Not everyone has the same system of morals. A lot of people, probably most, think that bad behavior is socially contagious. It's a premise that is not exactly divorced from reality. E.g. I would certainly be at least concerned if my daughter's friends were drug users, because I do think children and adolescents can pick up bad habits from the people around them. To these people, the possibility of drugs raises the threat of personal danger to their families.

Some people further think that bad habits like drug use can be controlled through legal means. I don't think they believe it can be eliminated, but I think they believe that if we did not have a drug war, drug use would be a lot more common.

Furthermore, those people can justify the damage caused by enforcement on the grounds that it happens to people who bring it upon themselves, by participating in drug use and drug trade. Even this proposition isn't totally divorced from reality, at least within the U.S. There is lots of collateral damage, but by and large the people dying in gang wars are involved in gangs to begin with, and the people in jail for drug crimes did use or deal drugs.

You don't have to agree with any of this to concede that these ideas are rooted in some sort of moral framework. Not a particularly compassionate moral framework, but there is nothing about moral frameworks that requires them to be compassionate.

Re: Kofi Annan: Stop 'war on drugs'

#86

Post by wh-uws »

willholloway wrote: post #66
oh_sigh wrote: post #10

I love how whenever a major world leader comes out against the war on drugs, it is always after they are out of office and generally retired from political life.

In a far off yet inevitable future of bounty and abundance... physical and emotional pain have been edited out of our genetic code, replaced by neurochemically enhanced empathy & bliss & a lavish minimum income frees our leaders to put social good ahead of job security. Until then, we're still living primitively... in the jungle as a savage, infant race.

is that from a movie?

Re: Kofi Annan: Stop 'war on drugs'

#87

Post by tokenadult »

"We called on governments to adopt more humane and effective ways of controlling and regulating drugs. We recommended that the criminalization of drug use should be replaced by a public health approach." So the request here is not to say that everyone should use drugs however they wish without regulation, but rather that use of certain drugs should no longer be subject to criminal penalties. A few years ago, Richard Branson's blog post on drug regulation[1] similarly pointed to reducing criminal penalties without saying that drugs should be entirely unregulated, by looking at the example of Portugal. (How is Portugal doing these days?)

The state I live in in the United States, Minnesota, has a low rate of incarceration in large part because it has a low rate of criminal prosecution of drug offenses, with even the small number of persons convicted of drug offenses being unlikely to do time in prison. But this state has a thriving private industry of drug treatment centers, drawing in people from all over the world who want to become clean, and responses to drug use often include judicially ordered drug treatment. Stopping a war on drugs waged by the police and courts and prisons doesn't have to include giving up on discouraging drug use.

[1] http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/time-to-end-the-war-on...

AFTER EDIT: I'll use the last bit of my edit window to post two more links to news reports about the experience of Portugal. These links are in chronological order, and newer than Richard Branson's blog post.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/evaluating-drug-d...

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-05-01/news/ct-met-po...

Re: Kofi Annan: Stop 'war on drugs'

#88

Post by drzaiusapelord »

MichaelGG wrote: post #39
sigzero wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is zero chance that drugs like crack are going to ever be decriminalized.

Would it need to be decriminalized if cocaine was properly sold, like it used to be? One can quite easily cook cocaine into crack if they so desire.

It has been established as physically addictive, so no, selling it "properly" won't help.

Re: Kofi Annan: Stop 'war on drugs'

#89

Post by ambler0 »

girvo wrote: post #69
ambler0 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry to hear about your brother. My younger brother is also a heroin addict. I watched him change from one of the sweetest people I knew and the best man at my wedding into an awful excuse for a human being. I am not so sure I would support the legalization of heroin. At times I have expressed support for the Gore Vidal approach, i.e. legalize all drugs and provide them at cost. In any case, I fully agree that d…

I'm an ex heroin addict. Have been on Suboxone for a year and a half (nearly off it, only two months to go yay!) after being addicted from 16-22 years old. Would I still be where I am if heroin was legal and I was on that for ORT instead of Suboxone? I think I would -- as it stands, I'm still on an extremely strong opiate daily, but it is pure and legal, so a lot of the issues fall away from it. The problem is: that'…

Totally agree that the current approach is not working, and that's why I say that, regardless of which drugs we choose to fully legalize, all of them should be decriminalized. Most people who become addicts are already traumatized in some way and throwing them into the machinery of the criminal justice system only compounds the problem.

The healthcare situation also makes it worse. My brother had considerable difficulty obtaining Suboxone, and even after establishing a relationship with the only doctor in our area who prescribes it, was not able to afford the enormous expense. It's just pathetic that he had a much easier time acquiring this legal drug illegally from fellow addicts.

I wish you the very best with your recovery.

Re: Kofi Annan: Stop 'war on drugs'

#90

Post by ryanatkn »

tokenadult wrote: post #87

"We called on governments to adopt more humane and effective ways of controlling and regulating drugs. We recommended that the criminalization of drug use should be replaced by a public health approach." So the request here is not to say that everyone should use drugs however they wish without regulation, but rather that use of certain drugs should no longer be subject to criminal penalties. A few years ago, Richard…

"Ten Years After Decriminalization, Drug Abuse Down by Half in Portugal"

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years-af...

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